Just beat Batman: Return of the Joker (NES). I’ve owned this game for a while and never really played it. It seemed to be really inferior to the first Batman on NES in every way but graphics. I actually spent some time with it now though and it’s a solid game in its own right. Some of the music is great and it’s one of the best looking NES games out there. The gameplay is better than my initial thoughts too. Tough but not unfair.

The main problem I have with it is how broken the weapon system is. You have a standard gun, then three choices of upgrades, but one of them is so superior to the rest that it’s the only one you’ll use. Seriously, the options are, wave gun that shoots in a parabola that will sometimes go over the enemy’s head, spread gun that shoots straight and diagonally and is just as underpowered as the standard gun, or gun that kills enemies in one hit and has a ricochet that will hurt additional enemies. Tough choice. Using the best gun you can even just rapid fire at the wall on a couple bosses and it will take them down in no time. In fact, you can do this on the last boss. After a fairly tough penultimate boss fight which took me about 5 tries, I was able to kill the last boss on my second try when I realized I could use this technique. I have a feeling it would take more like 20 tries if I wasn’t able to spam the shot.

Imagine, if you will, that you're on vacation in France exploring the countryside by car. It's a beautiful day, and everywhere you look, flowers are in bloom. Now imagine that your companion and navigator on your drive is the paperclip from Microsoft Word. Now imagine that the engine overheats every 15 kilometers, forcing you to pull over and let it cool for ten minutes, and you have a tire blow every 50 kilometers. That's basically how it feels to play Assassin's Creed Unity. It's got the potential to be absolutely fantastic, but two key flaws make sure it will never even begin to approach that potential.

Assassin's Creed Unity quickly became a bit of a meme online for the fact that its plethora of bugs and major technical issues made it nearly unplayable. Unfortunately even four years after launch, it's only reached the level of "technically playable." It took me two days to play through Unity, and in that time, the game completely crashed six times - two of which resulted in having to hard reset the Xbox - and I encountered a cornucopia of more minor bugs from floating characters to clipping through objects to characters getting caught on objects not to mention the serious frame rate issues. Yeah, it's playable, but it makes a Bethesda game on launch day look downright stable. Even after sizable patches were released in the time following its 2014 launch, it's a buggy mess. As was the case when I played Sonic Boom with its 1.2 GB patch (and that was a 1.2 GB patch on Wii U), I shudder to think what this game was like before any patching.

The performance issues are bad enough, but that's only one of Unity's two major flaws. The other is an overzealous parkour system. Free running has always been one of my favorite things about Assassin's Creed. I love sprinting through the environment, climbing up and jumping off buildings, and jogging across ropes strung between structures. Unity does that a lot better than Rogue did, but not by much. What they did well with letting you climb pretty much anything is completely killed by the fact that the system seems intent on having your character do anything except what you want him to. Want to climb in a window? How about we have you just climb up above the window instead three times in a row? Want to shift your position in cover? Let's just stand up and wave at the guards who are trying to kill you. Want to perform a double assassination? Na, just kill one guy and shake hands with the other. Some of that stuff happens on occasion in every Assassin's Creed game from simple user error, but it's consistent here. You'll find yourself climbing everything under the sun regardless of whether or not you're even trying to, and actually killing who you intend with air assassinations is a crapshoot even with the game's red outline for your "targeted" foe.

The combat system is another missed opportunity albeit far less egregious than the parkour and general performance. There seems to be a certain amount of chance involved in whether or not your character actually parries or evades when you press the button. Sometimes, it seems, he just feels like standing there and getting stabbed despite your desperate button presses. Given the the fluidity of parries and ripostes was always my favorite part of combat in Assassin's Creed, this was a major source of disappointment for me. As far as visuals go, the game looks nice. Too bad those good visuals are hampered by a sluggish frame rate and textures that take their sweet time rendering, sometimes waiting until halfway through a cut scene to stop being a blurry mess. At least the voice acting is good. The story is pretty interesting, too. Good luck not being too disappointed to really appreciate either of those, though.

Assassin's Creed Unity is...okay. It's a really good game buried beneath layers and layers of caked on technical flaws and questionable design choices. Unfortunately that's caked on THICK. It's not nearly as broken as Sonic Boom, but it's not far off. The narrative and characters are a big redeeming factor for Unity, and my opinion of it would be a lot lower if it weren't for that. If you're a fan of the Assassin's Creed series, then yeah, give it a play. If you're either a casual Assassin's Creed player or relatively unfamiliar with the series, however, skip Unity. Its problems are great enough that I can really only recommend this one to serious fans of the series.

I posted a bit about Thor in the Together Retro thread, but it is a more-than-servicable beat-em-up with some great sprite work and better bosses. Worth checking out, even if you don't care about Marvel shit.

I finally played through Destiny 2's most recent DLC, and it was fine. I think the problem with Destiny 2 is that nothing really excites me about the game or pushes me to keep playing it the way I did the first game, at least not to the same extent. Still, I look forward to the Forsaken expansion coming later this year and will try to get my levels up in preparation...

Assassin's Creed Chronicles is a trilogy of 2.5D action platformers set in the Assassin's Creed universe the first of which was China. These games have gotten a lot of criticism online, and most of the critical reception seems to have been lukewarm at best, but as one who not only often disagrees with critical opinions of games but who also loves modern 2D games, I was eager to give the trilogy a go for myself, and I am not finding myself disappointed.

AC Chronicles China takes place in China in the year 1526 and centers around the assassin Shao Jun. Having completed her training with Ezio Auditore, Shao returns to China to avenge the Assassin Brotherhood of China that had been wiped out by the Templar group Eight Tigers. To accomplish this goal, she takes a Precursor box she was given by Ezio and allows herself to be captured by the Templar in order to infiltrate their base and begin her counterattack. After escaping from her cell, she must make her way through various levels, navigating platforming obstacles and either avoiding or killing Templar agents, as she hunts down the eight Templar knights of the Eight Tigers.

In what was probably the polar opposite of Assassin's Creed Unity in my opinion, AC Chronicles China's weakest point is probably the story having been completely overshadowed by the incredible gameplay. The game's learning curve is almost perfect with the early levels being extremely easy to allow for learning the game's mechanics with the last levels being extremely difficult without careful strategy and precise execution. The game's graphics have a beautiful almost hand drawn aesthetic to them, and most of the story is told through still frames between levels that look as if they were painted in traditional Chinese style. The game's story may be just okay, and the game itself may be too short for some folks' taste, but it's not lacking in any way whatsoever as far as presentation goes.

Even with breaking for lunch and a nap, I finished Assassin's Creed Chronicles China in around eight hours, so it's definitely doable for an afternoon. Given that it's only got a $10 price tag, however, that's seems pretty fair to me considering that folks pay more than that for a single admission to a movie that lasts less than two hours. I may be in the minority here with this opinion, but I absolutely loved AC Chronicles China and found it to be a much better game in terms of quality than either Rogue or Unity. If you play games, you probably have one of the platforms it's on, so I highly recommend you give it a download.

So Resident Evil 7 was touted as a return to the more survival horror aspect of things, rather than just being a zombie shooter like the more recent mainline games had become (amusingly, the first Revelations game did manage to return to the feel of classic RE games, and Revelations 2 at least wasn't combat focused). And in one sense, it succeeds. But it ends up overcorrecting and has an incredibly rough first half, followed by a blah second half.

RE7 spends most of the game completely divorced from the general canon. There's no returning characters or mentions of the T-Virus or anything like that. It's just a mysterious message from your old girlfriend that brings you out to the Louisana backwoods (first mistake), followed by discovering a crazy family that will murder your face off. You have to avoid them and find a way to escape and save your old girlfriend. Only at the very end does it get connected back to the series, and frankly I think it could have used just a touch more of that. The game ends with too many unanswered questions.

Gameplay-wise, the most notable thing is the game is in first person. This has two consequences. The first is that the game uses it to inflict a lot of Saw-esque shock horror on you. You get to watch yourself get stabbed, then pull out the thing that stabbed you, and other such things. It also allows the game to do proper jump scares, which they couldn't do back in the era of fixed camera angles. Sort of a mixed bag there. The other thing is it makes the fights against the mold zombies intensely frustrating, as they like to weave around and not get hit, while still taking a lot of your anemic ammo to take down. It gets better once you get the shotgun and stop caring about precision, but the gunplay never gets fun, and that's a problem for a first person game. The old RE games were fine because the gun was just a tool to climb an obstacle; it wasn't about actually firing.

The first person perspective allows the game to focus a bit more on stealth, which is both good and bad. The good is it adds to the atmosphere, the bad is that it's super frustrating, because they have brought back the old exploration gameplay, so it gets interrupted by the evil family hunting you. They basically act as this game's version of the Nemesis, but there is a caveat; you can't take them down outside of designated boss fights. If they're just roaming they exist to wear down your health and to trick you into wasting ammo on them. At least the Nemesis could be either dodged (and he was always only in a pathway, rather than patrolling around places you were exploring) or killed for an ever increasing reward. And even more frustrating, the first couple of the boss fights are puzzle fights, so you learn all the wrong lessons. Then the next couple require you to fight them with the goal of dealing enough damage to kill, and you're waiting to try and find the trick. And the fights are super cumbersome because the enemies are more mobile than they should be given your ability to use your weapons. Late game you have some heavy artillery that keeps the fights snappy, so then it isn't so bad. But again, the gameplay isn't teaching you properly.

And the place where the game is really a letdown is the level design. Unlike the first few games you don't have this large, interconnected map. You have a series of small set pieces. And while you might have to find some key items in a given setpiece, it doesn't move you back and forth between them, so the whole thing feels a lot more linear than the old games, even though if you write out what you do the linearity is the same. I get that it would have been hard to justify yet another mansion, but RE3 got around that with city streets to achieve the same feel.

While I feel the game is a step in the right direction compared to 5 and 6, it still falls very short of the original trilogy.

Games Beaten: 2015201620172018Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.

One of the story DLCs for RE7, Not A Hero is set immediately after the base game and wraps up one of the loose ends, as well as tying things in more with the overall RE canon and explaining how the timeline has advanced. Gameplay-wise, it hews closer to RE5 and 6; it's much more actionized and you even have the loop of shooting something in the head with a pistol and then using your special melee attack on stagger to kill the enemy. That said, they did make the level design a bit more interesting than 5 and 6, as you need to criss cross between a few areas as you get key items to be able to traverse each area, and there's even a recreation of the Half Life booby trapped room to spice things up. There's also two boss fights, though both of them consist of just unloading your firepower into them; no need to worry about finding complicated weakpoints or anything. It took me just over an hour to get through, so it's short. The nice thing is it's free on Steam, but it also makes me not interested in the other story DLC; I don't think I'm going to get value for my money.

Games Beaten: 2015201620172018Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.

The game was developed by Data East, and initially released in the arcades in '88. Numerous ports followed. Most notably on the NES, though there were also the semi-playable home computer variants. The arcade original was officially emulated as part of Data East Arcade Classics (Wii, 2010) and is now available on the Nintendo Switch eShop as part of the Johnny Turbo's Arcade line. There were a couple of hiccups with the Switch release. It launched with some control issues (the dudes were unable to execute their special attack), and the official dashboard icon displayed some (admittedly quality) fan art rather than the actual Bad Dudes title screen. Hilarious. The bad dudes of Bad Dudes are named Blade and Striker. When President "Ronnie" is captured by the DragonNinja gang, the dudes are sent on a rescue mission. No reason to send in an army; if Contra taught us anything it's that two guys in tank tops can do the job just as effectively. The game's a beat 'em up with two-player co-op. All action takes place on flat planes with the ability to super-jump low to high, a mechanic similar to that of Shinobi and Rolling Thunder. Combat is close-range, with the standard array of punches, kicks, and jump attacks. There are weapons like nunchucks which aid in extending the attack range a bit. A "Qi" charge attack is available, but it requires holding down the attack button for just a bit too long, leaving a dude vulnerable. Controls will feel awkward to those accustomed to the NES, as they're unfortunately "backwards" (B is jump, A is attack). If you grew up playing Zillion and Quartet on the Master System (did such people exist?) you'll feel right at home with this one, though. The game takes about thirty minutes to complete and feels long. Stages lack variety, most are just dull flat expanses, with the exception of the two unexceptional auto-scrollers. The stock ninjas are fist-fodder, most going down with a single punch. It's easy to smack these guys as soon as their sprites spawn onscreen; it's important to do so too as many will drop explosives. The majority of boss battles employ the same "gimmick" -- a long range weapon that's tough to dodge without applying some fancy footwork. Visuals are mixed. While the stage designs are rather lifeless, sprites are large and move fluidly. Some of the bosses look rather cool, and the cameo appearance of Karnov from Karnov always elicits a chuckle or two. I'm rather impressed with the soundtrack: saucy techno beats that vastly enhance this otherwise mundane button-masher.

This is a hard one to pin down. The game's more "funny" than it is "good." A single playthrough should set one for a lifetime, but I can't help but love the cornball 80s-ness about the whole thing. It's certainly not a bad game (see what I did there) but one should approach with caution and keep those expectations in check.

I beat Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour on the Nintendo GameCube this afternoon!

Golf on the original NES was one of my first and favorite video games to go back to for many years. It's simple and calming game play was a nice fresher and change of pace compared to the many other games I would play. Because of that, I have always enjoyed and had a soft spot for gold video games. My favorite so far would be Mario Golf on the Nintendo 64 as that was a perfect pick up and play video game. It was just right to play while I was killing time or waiting for my friend to call. After getting burnt out on the game, I decided to finally get the GameCube version. I found it sitting in a store one day and after a short while, I finally got around to playing the game.

Not much has changed with the GameCube iteration compared to the N64 counterpart and that is a good thing. It still plays exactly like Mario Golf which is a fantastic combination of a light simulation feel of a Golf game. This is not EA Sports Golf, nor should it be as it is just an enjoyable and simple version of Golf. They did do some refinements with the largest being the automatic shot. Before, you would select your club, hit 'A' to swing, 'A' for Power and then 'A' for Accuracy. Now, the game randomly does the accuracy part for you. You can turn it off to do it yourself, but it obviously makes the game a bit more easier. Also, you can adjust where you want the ball to land with the shoulder buttons and that will change the target on the power meter. Now, you have a more refined ability to gauge your shot so that you are not blasting it all the time. The course design is rather unique especially the final course which is Bowser's Castle. With warp pipes, Boos and Thomps all over the place, it adds a nice touch and makes for a more interesting round of golf.

Some of the courses however can basically screw you. With large hills and a long distance for shots, you basically can get stuck and have to take a large penalty just to move onto the next hole. Thankfully, the old way of saving and reloading your game works well to diffuse this problem. Also, the power gauge moves faster than expected, so the first couple of rounds will be hard rather frustrating.

I mean, golf is a frustrating game, but it is also very calming. With so many modes that I haven't even touched yet, the replayability of the game is off the charts which is good for a really enjoyable golf game.

Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India is the second part of the AC Chronicles trilogy taking place in the mid-19th Century, a little over 300 years following the events of AC Chronicles: China. Mechanically, it's pretty much identical (as one would probably expect), but there are some key differences with regards to how stealth and combat are carried out.

The biggest difference is that instead of throwing knives, you've got one of the circle blade thingies like Xena had. It serves the same purpose as the throwing knives in China, but unlike those knives, this can ricochet, allowing for some added possibilities for puzzles and strategy. The only other really noteworthy difference - with regards to design, at least - is the increased difficulty; it's pretty apparent early on that, as the second game in the trilogy, Ubisoft expects that you've played through China first.

The story is...kind of dumb, frankly. You're an Indian assassin obviously, and you're trying to prevent the Templars from using some magic diamond to activate Ezio's Precursor box from the previous game. Oh, and your girlfriend is apparently a princess. The entire first level is sneaking into the palace to have a spiritual study of the Kama Sutra. And you can't kill anyone. It all has to be done non-lethal. Not a great way to make a first impression. The characters, at least, are likable enough, and it's cool that the British East India Company was the front for the Templars in this game, so you'll be killing a lot of Redcoats.

There's one more big difference, and this is one that I highly doubt Ubisoft intended; it's pretty buggy. There were a couple instances of guards spawning abruptly, disappearing, and - most hilariously/annoying - one instance where I clipped straight through the level and had to reload the previous checkpoint. Once or twice, okay, that's one thing. Games have bugs. But this was more of a "poor QA" situation. Granted, it wasn't NEARLY as bad as Unity, but it was still pretty bad.

Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India kept the same gameplay from China for the most part, but unfortunately, it doesn't live up to the quality of its predecessor. It's still a really fun game for fans of 2.5D action platformers, but the story is less interesting, the protagonist a bit is less likable, and performance took a serious hit with some pretty noticeable bugs. If you played China and enjoyed it, then it's definitely worth playing, but India definitely felt like a bit of a step back.